by Bobby Adair
“Yeah,” I said, “but who?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not at the moment,” I admitted, “but eventually, it could.”
It was when I turned right onto Mt. Bonnell Road and started heading up the long crest of the mountain, I saw evidence of the fires I’d started with that fizzled gasoline vapor bomb I’d tried to use on the naked horde a few months back. Any trees that weren’t black skeletons of wood were partially burned or covered with leaves left brown and dead by the heat. The shells of dozens of cars sat in driveways in front of ashen ruins. Not all the houses were burned. The fire had taken a haphazard toll on the neighborhood with no discernable pattern. Burned foundations sat next to houses that went untouched. Other houses were partially burned and some cars seemed to have made it through the firestorm unscathed.
One thing, though, was gruesome and satisfying at the same time. The remains of charred bodies, gnawed bones, and shredded clothing were scattered everywhere. I knew that I hadn’t killed all of the naked horde—not by far—but I’d killed many more of them than I’d suspected.
In that moment, thinking of all the dead, I grew angry with myself. If only I’d built a better bomb, I might have killed enough of them that they wouldn’t have been a danger to us when we were trying to load our people in the Humvees to drive out to Balmorhea. If enough of the naked horde was dead on this mountain, then maybe Steph would still be alive.
Repress the memories.
That’s the ticket to sanity.
Forget.
When we reached Sarah Mansfield’s house, all of the cedars that had hidden it from the road were burned to fingery black sticks, reaching for the sky. The wall that I’d seen the horde knock down on the video a few months earlier was broken and scattered with the remains of the dead. The acres of green grass that had been kept mowed by those robotic lawnmowers were thick with bones and charred black lumps that used to be people.
The house itself was scorched, yet surprisingly intact. Most of the windows were not broken. It appeared not to have caught fire, although all of the tropical plants in the multi-colored, glazed pots on the front porch were burned away.
I pointed toward the city park that sat just up the road, at the peak of Mount Bonnell. “I know we were going to cruise on by and head up to the peak. But we could go in and get pretty much the same view from Sarah’s roof.”
Murphy grimaced. “I don’t want to mess up my shoes in all that shit.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Murphy laughed. “I’m just fucking with you. I think it’s a waste of time, but if you want to go in there…” Murphy finished with a shrug and a look of disgust.
I already had the Mustang rolling into the driveway.
Chapter 21
The crunch of bones under the tires made me ease off the accelerator as I tried vainly to steer the car around the bodies. By the time the Mustang rolled onto the wide, round courtyard in front of the house and garage, I’d given up that attempt. Too many bodies. Too many bones.
Before getting out, as I was looking around in the darkness, I said, “The garage looks surprisingly good.”
“Scorched a bit,” said Murphy.
“It had all those solar panels on the roof,” I said.
“You think they survived?”
I shrugged. I hoped. Or at least as I sat there looking at the garage, I started to hope. “I reset the access codes before I… you know. Before.”
“You still remember the number?”
“I set them to my ATM pin number so I wouldn’t forget.”
“Good idea.” Murphy took another look around. “Let’s go see, then.”
We both got out of the car. I stepped carefully through the human remains, trying to figure out which spots of blackened crud were the burnt pavers of the driveway and which were some part of an infected person who’d been killed by the fire I’d created. Anything remotely soft, anything that slipped under my boot sent a tingle of disgust up my spine.
We crossed over toward the catwalk and the previously impenetrable gate beside the garage. It was hanging on one hinge. The naked horde had managed to destroy it. I whispered, “How’d they do that?”
Murphy shook his head and continued to scan the area around us, keeping his rifle at his shoulder, ready to unload on what I’m sure he expected—a mob of naked Whites swarming out of the house.
We passed through the broken gate and walked along to the point where the catwalk to the house’s front door crossed the ravine between the house and the garage. I flipped up the panel covering the keypad beside the garage door. Although the cover was disfigured, it had protected the rubbery silicone buttons from the flames that had momentarily engulfed the whole complex. In a very nice little surprise, the display screen on the keypad lit up.
I tapped the keypad with my finger as I nudged Murphy to look. I smiled.
He shrugged and turned his attention to covering my back while I strayed off mission.
I keyed in my number, the door lock clicked, and with my machete raised I swung it open. “Holy crap.”
Murphy spun around and pointed the barrel of his rifle over my shoulder and into the garage.
“Dammit, Zed,” Murphy huffed. “Don’t startle me like that.”
“You’re quick when you’re startled.”
“I know,” he said.
“Look.” I pointed into the well-lit garage as I stepped across its pristine floor. “C’mon.” I waved Murphy to follow. “This place is clean. They never got in here.”
Murphy stepped inside, letting the door swing closed to a click of the lock. He started a search of the garage, looking for any Whites that might be inside. I stopped gawking at the well-lit orderliness and realized I should be doing the same.
Murphy passed by the rear of Sarah Mansfield’s Tesla sitting exactly where it was the last time I saw it. I hurried down to the front of the car, near the wall of closed garage doors, and started my walk, paralleling Murphy’s path—looking down the row of cars, looking between, looking inside, and looking beneath. We passed the old Corvette. We checked the Mercedes.
Once we’d looked over the Humvee, with doors still hanging open and old dried blood on the seats—some of it Steph’s—Murphy shook his head and broke his silence. “I can’t believe this is all still here.”
Still staring at the crust of blood on the seat, I thought about the night we’d arrived at Sarah’s house. I absently said, “I guess that means the solar cells didn’t get too damaged by my fire.”
“Or at least all of them didn’t.”
I turned away from the blood and closed the door. I looked back up to the other end of the five-car garage. I pointed at the Tesla. “We could pull the Mustang in and charge it there.”
“I guess,” Murphy agreed.
“We should at least bring it in and top off the charge.” I needed to get my mind off Steph. How do you move on without the guilt of trying to forget? How do you forget the painful parts without attaching the brief bits of happiness? I said, “This is exactly what we were hoping to find around Austin, right? Houses with solar power where we could recharge the Mustang.”
Murphy looked down at me with a cautious question on his face.
“What?”
He shook his head and glanced at the garage side door we’d come through.
“What?”
He sighed. “You’re thinking about moving back in, aren’t you?”
“No.” That was the truth. He’d guessed wrong at the meaning of the distance in my voice, the suddenness of my apparent absence. After all of Murphy’s prodding to get me moving out of my wallowing self-pity over Steph, I felt like I was letting him down by letting myself get lost in my thoughts about her. I chose a lie and ran with it. “Maybe. This was a pretty sweet place when we were staying here.”
“You’ve been back inside after that naked bunch of shit monkeys fucked it all up.” Murphy lowered his weapon and thumbed in the direction of the lawn
. “Not to mention the corpse farm. Why would you even think about staying here? The place is too fucked up.”
“It’s like those ranchers out in the country,” I said, “the ones that hang the coyote carcasses on their fences to keep the other coyotes away. All of the dead Whites outside will keep the live Whites away.”
“Bullshit,” said Murphy. “I don’t want to hear it, man. Let’s just get the Mustang in here and get it charged.”
Chapter 22
It only took a few minutes to get the cars jockeyed around in the garage so that our Mustang was backed into the Tesla’s spot. In the Mustang’s trunk, besides a layer of electronic-looking stuff with hundreds of blue glowing LEDs—the battery system for the car, I guess—were adapters for the car’s plug and a long length of thick cord. It looked like we could plug it into just about anything, including the Tesla’s power station. Thank Mitch for spending the extra time and work on that choice. We decided that when we left the next day, we’d move the Tesla back to its spot in the garage so we could leave it plugged in. You never know when a fully charged car is going to come in handy. We found a spot outside to stash a garage door opener, just in case, and proceeded warily into the house.
To my immense surprise, nothing inside the house was burned. Definitely a good/bad sort of thing. Good in that there was hope the house could be salvaged. Bad in that all of the Smart Ones who were leading the naked horde had escaped the wrath of my fizzled gasoline vapor bomb.
The house stank of old urine, feces, rotting bodies, and mold.
My mind started clicking through renovation plans. I knew the house had been built with concrete walls—still visible—and concrete floors. I figured all we’d need to do was throw all the reeking furniture over the balcony and rip up the ruined wood flooring. From there, we could make the place more than livable. It still had running water, electricity, air conditioning, and heating.
It looked like much of the surveillance equipment survived the fire, and in a fortuitous turn that I still couldn’t believe, the vast wine cellar in the basement had never been fouled by the Whites who took over the house. The doors remained closed. And although the glass wall was smeared with all manner of human filth, inside the room was perfect—the right temperature, the right humidity, the right level of light, and no smell. None at all.
Whatever kind of system Sarah Mansfield had installed to maintain the atmosphere in the wine cellar was surpassing its design specifications in getting its job done.
That made it all the more attractive to slip a bottle of some nice red wine I’d never heard of into my bag. I assumed it was obscure to me because its price kept it off my radar when I was at the liquor store. That and it wasn’t sold in a box.
By the time we made it up to the roof, ground zero of my gasoline vapor bomb, we found evidence of the blast. Actually, we found almost nothing up there. It apparently had all been blasted off to kingdom come. That was proof that something big and violent had happened.
The charred concrete skeleton of the outdoor kitchen still stood. The metal columns that had supported the pergola stood straight, supporting nothing. All of the lounge chairs, tables, umbrellas, the potted plants, and more to the point, the bodies of any Whites who’d been on the roof at the time of the explosion were gone. The pool, however, remained perfectly intact, and whatever automated system had been installed to keep the water skimmed and filtered was doing a job just as spectacular as the climate control system in the wine cellar. It was perfectly aqua blue and as clear as Caribbean surf.
“I’ll be damned,” said Murphy when he saw the pool.
“Me too,” I agreed.
Chapter 23
The next morning, after a night spent at a comfortable seventy-two degrees on an uncomfortable—yet safe—concrete garage floor, Murphy and I were back on Sarah Mansfield’s roof. We were splitting a can of SPAM and each of us had a can of fruit. Peaches for me, fruit cocktail for Murphy.
“We need to find some sleeping bags or something,” said Murphy as he rubbed at a kink in his neck.
I nodded. It was too bad the Whites who’d taken over the house had fouled every piece of anything that might be used for a pillow, mattress, or blanket. “You know, we should check the elevator today and see if it still works.”
“The mad bomber evaluating his effectiveness,” Murphy laughed.
I ignored the wisecrack. “I’m just saying, we’ll have some time to kill today. I mean, if we’re sticking with the plan to drive after dark.”
“Yeah,” Murphy nodded. “It worked great on the drive down here. I don’t see any reason to start being more stupid now.”
“More stupid?” I asked, knowing exactly what Murphy was talking about. Damn near everything we’d done so far was arguably a stupid idea. However, we were both alive. I kept my favorite argument on that topic to myself: Most people weren’t alive.
“I’m gonna jump in the pool and wash myself and my clothes,” Murphy said as he stepped up to the edge.
Surprised into silence, I only had time to watch as he plunged in.
After a big splash, he stood up on the pool’s bottom and shouted, “Damn, that’s cold!”
I craned my neck to see over the edge of the roof. Any loud sound might draw the attention of Whites you didn’t know were listening. I turned to Murphy. “I thought you didn’t swim.”
“It’s only five feet deep.” Murphy splashed me. “You could probably use a dunk, too.”
Shaking my head, I said, “I’ll keep watch. Besides, I just had a swim in the lake, with all my clothes on, if you’ll remember correctly.”
“Didn’t your mom ever tell you that you should bathe every day?” Murphy grinned.
I ignored him and walked over to lean on a wall from which I had a good view of the city.
We whiled away the morning doing not much of anything—talking about trivial nothings, pointing at places in the distance where we had a favorite restaurant or bar. We talked about old girlfriends, avoiding mention of Mandi and Steph. We speculated about what the world might look like five or ten years down the road.
We mostly ignored the carpet of bones and charred, rotting bodies spread across every visible open space below us. We watched the river flow by and listened to the birds in the trees. It was almost peaceful.
When the helicopters came—two of them, flying from north to south as was their habit—the sound grew up out of the silence. At that point, we stopped talking and simply watched. They flew over Austin’s skyline, but before reaching the tallest buildings, they both descended and circled in the area just south of the university.
I pointed. “It looks like they’re going to land on the Capitol grounds.”
Shaking his head, Murphy said, “I doubt it. They’re probably just shooting at some more Whites like us.”
“No,” I said. “Look.”
The helicopters sank lower and lower.
“See that pointy tip just behind that big blocky building. That’s the Capitol. I think they’re landing.” Sometimes stating your point twice helps it sink in.
Both helicopters disappeared.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Murphy. “That can’t be safe down there. Whites are all over the place.”
“Unless the naked horde cleaned them out when they rolled through town.”
“No way,” Murphy disagreed. “There are too many people in Austin to think those naked fucktards killed and ate all of ‘em.”
“According to Jeff Aubrey’s calculations,” I said, “something exactly like that was supposed to happen. How long has it been now?”
Murphy shrugged. “It’s what, late November? Early December maybe.”
“Everything started in August. Three solid months. A lot of them could be dead.”
“Yet we still see them everywhere, right?” Murphy asked.
“Yeah,” I agreed, “but nothing like the massive hordes of them we were seeing. Not only that, but back in the beginning, they were like under
every mattress, behind every door.”
“Whatever,” said Murphy. “You’re thinking about it all wrong. Just because we’ve been holed up in that house up by the lake for awhile with no Whites around most of the time, you think they all wandered off. We only left that place two days ago and how many Whites have we seen?”
“Lots,” I said. “But—”
“No buts,” said Murphy. “We saw them at the house where we got shot at. We saw them at Camp Mabry—”
“We always see them at Camp Mabry,” I argued.
“That’s right. And there they were, just like always.”
“No,” I argued. “Not just like always. Usually, there are like a million of them there. This time it was a few dozen hiding in those empty bunkers.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Murphy huffed. “All I’m saying is that we keep seeing them. They’re out there—a lot of them. As soon as you get to thinking that maybe we’ve turned some kind of corner and there aren’t that many, then you’re going to do something stupid and try to get us killed again. That’s all I’m saying. So, don’t think that stupid shit.”
“I can think whatever I want,” I told him, feeling a tad petulant.
“Then keep that stupid shit to yourself, because I don’t want to get munched by a pack of hungry Whites, okay?”
“Damn,” I forced a smile. “Somebody misses Starbucks.”
Chapter 24
Being close to Thanksgiving, the sun set earlier in the day. Murphy and I rearranged the cars just as we’d discussed, buttoned up the garage, and rolled down Mt. Bonnell Road with a full charge on the Mustang’s battery and a full charge on our night vision goggles. Unfortunately, we had less ammunition than we would have liked and few hand grenades.
Nothing is ever perfect.
We had a half moon and not many clouds. Through the night vision goggles the world looked bright and alive. Coyotes were prowling. Owls swooped silently down from the trees to skewer their talons through inattentive rats. Whites who happened to be looking at the road stopped what they were doing to piece together in their virus-diminished brains what the shiny black shadow was floating quietly past. Only a few made any effort to get close to the road for a better look, let alone a futile chase.
